Deformable rigid body hausdorff registration for multi-modal medical images

Image guided interventions (IGI) has the potential to replace conventional open and invasive procedures. These interventions also minimize damage to healthy tissue. Real-time 3D visualization of the problem area is now becoming a necessity for successful IGI. Real-time intra-operative imaging devices like multi-slice CT or 3D ultrasound are noisy and have low resolution hence they need to be compared with pre-operative high resolution images like MRI. Registering and comparing multi-modal images is inherently difficult due to the differences in visualization and the large number of missing features. A new deformable rigid body technique is presented which uses differential geometry based features and the hausdorff similarity measure for rigid body sub-division registration. The differential geometry based features and the hausdorff similarity measure are chosen because of their robustness to missing features and intensity variations. A translation deformation field is obtained which maps each pixel to a new location followed by a cubic interpolator to get the registered image. Experimental results show that the new registration technique offers better accuracy and quality, and is computationally less intensive compared to previous methods.